This is a long chapter, guys! Hope you like it.
XIV ANNABETH
THE THREE HALF-BLOODS BEGAN TO RETRACE THEIR STEPS back to the ship, running as quickly as they dared on the slippery rocks. Piper was absolutely crushed, cursing under her breath the entire time. The freezing winds tore right through Annabeth's sweater, which made it useless.
Jason stopped. "Down here," he remembered, taking them on a turn around a rock face. "This is where the Argo II should be—"
The three demigods froze. In front of them, just five meters ahead, slept a twenty-foot tall mountain god. He snored, and several boulders the size of Annabeth's cabin back on the ship shook and rumbled down the hill. Just a two-hundred-yard sprint behind him was the Argo II.
"Back up… slowly," Annabeth started, gradually retracing her steps. Both Piper and Jason were wide-eyed in surprise. Piper's mouth hung open slightly. Annabeth supposed she herself wasn't too different.
Jason wasn't paying attention to where he was stepping, and walked onto a cluster of loose rocks. He slipped sideways, landing on his hands. He got to his feet quickly, unharmed, but his fall created a mini rock-alanche. The stones hit one another, creating a chain reaction that went from a few rocks tumbling into some larger stones that simultaneously hit a large boulder that brought it several meters downhill until it crashed into a tree. The tree snapped in half with a loud CRACK!
None of the demigods moved as they waited to see what would happen. Annabeth's breath came out as short pants, pale white fog appearing in front of her face.
Nothing happened for the longest time. Then the ourae opened his eyes and blinked several times. Jaw-dropped in horror, the half-bloods watched as he sat up and stretched, drawing them into the shadows. He looked down and saw them, the expressions flitting through his face in seconds. Surprise. Perplexity. Anger.
He drew himself to his full height, which is considered tall at twenty feet. The ourae roared, and the entire mountain shook.
"Okay, forget that," Annabeth said. "Run!"
They split up in different directions; Jason went off to the mountain god's left, stumbling and cursing whenever he tripped over the uneven stones. Piper went the opposite way with Annabeth.
Just a two-hundred-meter sprint to the ship, she told herself. We can do this. She could already see others running about at the helm, the rope ladder hanging down for them to climb.
The ourae howled furiously, reaching down and picking up a boulder the size of a small car. He turned and chucked it right at Annabeth and Piper.
Jason flew in and slammed into them, knocking them out of the way of their (once) inevitable doom. The three of them skidded across the mountain in a demigod snowball, covering the rest of the way to the ship on their backside. Annabeth groggily got to her feet and spat on the stones in front of her, then quickly scaled the rope ladder and leaped over the Argo II's railing just as the ship rose higher into the air. Jason and Piper were already safe.
"Get out of here!" she shouted, although there was no need to. They were already sailing into the sky. The ourae roared, throwing a few more boulders at them that almost all missed. Annabeth didn't relax until Mount Olympus was just a monument in the distance. She collapsed against the foremast, exhausted. She hurt all over from her ten-meter slide, but with some Tylenol and half a day of sleep she'd be back on her feet in no time.
She had almost completely forgotten about the whole point of their visit when Frank asked, "So?"
"So what?" she asked, holding a throbbing head. The others were all gathered on the upper deck.
"So did you get what you needed?" Hazel finished.
Annabeth shook her head. "No," she replied, her throat dry. She swallowed and tried again. "Nothing except for sleeping rock gods."
"With obvious anger management issues," Leo noted, reading data off his Archimedes sphere. "Festus says one of those things he threw at us clipped the hull and shattered a few windows on the lowest deck. It's gonna take me twenty minutes to clean that up."
Hazel turned to Annabeth. "Why?" she asked. "Why wasn't there anything there?"
"We came to the wrong place," Piper explained. "It's all my fault. We needed to go to where the Homeric hymn said to go, to Delphi."
"Whoa whoa whoa," said Percy, holding out his hands in a timeout-T. "What's a Homeric hymn? And what does it have to do with deli? Isn't that ham?"
"The hymn something I read at Camp Half-Blood," Piper continued, running a hand through her hair in exasperation. "It's a prayer to Hestia, Vesta's Greek counterpart." She glanced at Leo expectantly. He sighed and looked it up on his all-knowing Archimedes sphere. He cleared his throat theoretically and began to read aloud.
"Hestia, you who tend the holy house of the lord Apollo, the Far-shooter at goodly Pytho, with soft oil dripping ever from your locks, come now into this house, having one mind with Zeus the all-wise: draw near, and withal bestow grace upon my song." He looked up. "Wow. Poetic much?"
Frank scratched his head. "'Soft oil dripping from your locks'… are we going to find her at a gas station or something?"
"It means we have to go to Delphi," said Annabeth. "The hymn refers to a different home, the home of Apollo."
"I still don't get what this has to do with ham," Percy finally decided.
Hazel rolled her eyes. "Just change our course, Leo."
-o-O-o-
By the time Annabeth woke up the next morning they were already in the valley of Phocis. Leo was at the helm, his hot pocket breakfast clenched between his teeth as he ran around fixing things on the ship. The hot pocket was on fire. Jason and Piper stood at the railing, watching the small towns fly underneath them. Percy was still sleeping, and Annabeth didn't know where Hazel or Frank was. She grabbed a quick breakfast banana and ate it as she watched Greece fly by below.
Something was bothering her. A myth about Gaea and Delphi, (and it was one of those weird ones that made Annabeth wonder if her entire existence was the practical joke of some being greater than the gods).
Maybe half an hour later Percy woke and Hazel and Frank showed up. Leo came up to them with the news.
"Well, we get to Delphi in about five minutes," he said. "A long trip from Olympus, and it took all night, but we're here. This better not be another screw up." He glanced pointedly at Annabeth and Piper.
"I hope not," said Hazel.
"Okay, so this should be what we do," Annabeth started. "The hymn refers to a house of Apollo, which is obviously the Temple of Apollo in Delphi, which should be where we start. Or at least, at the ruins of the place. Christians destroyed a lot of it later on in history."
"It seems like a good place to start," Jason admitted.
"Dang those zealous Christians," Leo said jokingly.
"You're insulting around one seventh of the world's population right now, Leo," Hazel warned.
"Oh, awesome," he said, looking around at the group. "So which one of us is it?"
"I'm going," Piper decided. "Our screw up last time was my fault."
"That's cool," said Annabeth, understanding her decision. If she were in her friend's position she would want this chance to redeem herself as well. "I can go too."
"Me too," Percy offered, rubbing his hands together eagerly as if they were going off to the candy store. "This'll be fun."
Frank suddenly frowned. "I just remembered something," he stated. "Doesn't it say in ancient myths that Delphi is Gaea's bellybutton or something?"
Leo tried to cover a laugh so it came out as a snort. "You're joking, right?" he said. He looked around at the others, who were (mostly) dead serious. "Please tell me he's joking."
Annabeth shook her head, the myth she had been trying oh-so-hard to forget returning. "Zeus one day decided he wanted to find the center of the earth, so he sent one eagle flying east and one eagle flying west. Somehow, bending the laws of science and common sense, they crossed paths, indicating the middle of everything—a.k.a., Gaea's navel."
"Or bellybutton," Leo offered as the archaeological site of Delphi appeared from between the clouds. "Bellybutton sounds funnier."
-o-O-o-
The Argo II dropped Percy, Piper and Annabeth off in the modern town of Delphi, and left to find a parking space above a forest nearby. The demigods blended in with all the other tourists and inhabitants easily. All the main streets were narrow, most of them were one-way, making the town a complex puzzle they needed to figure out. Eventually they passed by a nice, large white building claimed to be the Delphi Museum.
"We're close," Annabeth announced. "The archaeological site is just west from here."
As a matter of fact, a sign beside the museum announced, Temple of Apollo information here!
"Imagine our luck," Percy said as they walked over.
The three of them learned some key information about the temple, but the lady at the booth informed them that it was closed for the month. Earthquakes were becoming quite common in the region, although no one could explain why. And even though the temple buildings had added support so that a small tremor couldn't knock a column down, it still wasn't safe.
Of course, they were going anyway.
Percy, Annabeth and Piper crouched behind a bush by the Ancient Delphi town entrance. No one was there. A single bar was lowered across the parking lot entry to stop tourists from arriving, and an active video camera was pointed at the ticket booth. A ten-foot fence surrounded the perimetre. Slowly and cautiously, the demigods ran around the side of the fence to a deserted area and scaled up. No one saw them.
The area was eerily quiet. Annabeth felt herself reach for her dagger in assurance and tried to admire the architecture. It wasn't just the temple of Apollo there, but the entire town of ancient Delphi. Apollo's temple was just the center of it all—the one amazing attraction. The entire city was built against a mountain, a hill, and a very steep cliff. She imagined what the life of a common Greek citizen living here would have been like thousands of years ago. In the distance she could hear the roar of a mountain god echoing through the valleys, and the response of his brothers calling back.
Annabeth began reciting facts unconsciously.
"That amphitheatre can seat five thousand people," she started as they passed by. "Not a lot by standards today, but back then it was basically half or most of the village. There's also a temple to my mom a short jog away from this place called the Tholos. And a stadium at the top of this hill. That place could seat over six thousand five hundred spectators, and had a track of a hundred and fifty meters."
They reached the temple. Annabeth knew there were supposed to be tall columns surrounding it—protecting it—but over the course of two millennia they had all fallen down. She counted six rebuilt columns as they crawled under the small rope fence that traced around the boundary of the temple. Peering up at the freestanding columns as they walked between them, the demigods entered the temple. The stone floor was dry and cracked, the rocks mounted on top of each other in a way that would have made sense two thousand years ago, when most of the temple was still there. Annabeth glanced over to their left, back at the cliff. She swallowed nervously and kept walking.
Piper began to climb the stones, which varied in all sizes. Percy put a hand to his eyes to block out the sun.
"Nothing but ruins here," he noted. Piper reached the highest stone and performed a three-sixty.
"I can't see anything either," she told them. "Do you think we're in the wrong place again?"
Something rumbled. Piper fell off the stones, and Annabeth slipped backwards.
"What was—?" was all Percy managed before one of the stone columns performed a dangerous front flip over itself and crumbled on the spot. Two trees collapsed over themselves, forming a large X. Smaller stones began to rumble down the hill and toward the cliff. Annabeth watched in slow-motion horror.
"Earthquake," she said, which basically summed it all up. She looked at the others in terror. "It's an earthquake! We have to get out of here!"
Annabeth helped Piper to her feet and the three demigods raced away from the temple. The ground shook, which made running nearly impossible. They all fell against each other more than once.
"Follow—!" Annabeth yelled, and promptly tripped over her own feet and landed on her face. She got up again and kept running, spitting gravel. "Follow me!" she finished.
"I hate earth!" Piper cried as Annabeth led them up a vicious-steep hill. They reached the summit and threw themselves down a nearby path that led away from Delphi. Percy lost balance and fell forward, Riptide in pen-form clattering out of his grip.
"Come on!" Annabeth urged, and Percy scrambled to his feet, leaving his sword behind.
They sprinted down a second path with trees decorating the sides. This might not have been such a great idea, since they all began to fall down, threatening to squash them. Piper screamed, covering her ears with her hands.
"How long are earthquakes supposed to last?" Percy shouted over the roar of the falling forest.
"This isn't a normal earthquake," Annabeth told him. She suddenly veered to a stop, eyes widening in alarm. "Mother of Medusa—!"
A 100+-year-old tree fell just ahead of them, and if they had kept running it would have crushed them into demigod toothpaste. The three of them climbed over it and kept running, eventually reaching the end of the path. A large circular temple-like area greeted them. Three columns stood behind a rounded mounting of stones. The small area was surrounded by scattered boulders the size of bedside tables. A girl their age sat on one of the stones in the center temple, poking a long stick at a small flame at the center of the temple.
"The Tholos," Piper breathed. The ground rumbled again.
"Come on!" Annabeth shouted, and they ran between the stones to the temple. As soon as they mounted the steps the earthquakes subsided. No more rumbling. The girl looked up.
"Hey," she said. "I'm Vesta. What's up?"
Oh, the chapter is so long, and so much research was required... it deserves reviews.
